My original Rawls for Sheriff website got
overwritten when I switched from Mac to Windows way back in 2000. At the
bottom of this page I am trying to reconstitute the
original pre-2000 website. Immediately below is the stuff I added since
2000, though most of my online writing over this period has been at my Error
Theory blog. (I also do some co-blogging at Flopping Aces and What's Up With
That?")

The main focus of my post-2000 writings on this
website are the following five items:

In 1987 the California Sheriffs' Association sponsored a ban on
electoral competition from outside of the law enforcement establishment. Supreme
Court precedent requires that all election laws have the purpose of facilitating
the accurate expression of the will of the voters, as by weeding out frivolous
candidates (defined by the Court as candidates who do not have a serious chance
to win) but this restriction is motivated by the express fear, stated directly
in the legislative record, that without it the people will actually elect
sheriffs from outside of law enforcement (as indeed they had been doing). The
express purpose is to limit what the the people are allowed to choose, and in most audacious
fashion: NO CIVILIAN VIEWPOINTS ALLOWED! Our democracy has been usurped.

That's for starters. In addition to violating the First and
Fourteenth Amendments, the California sheriff restriction also violates the
Article IV section 4 guarantee to the states that they shall have a republican
form of government. The Supreme Court has long since recognized that the
fundamental principle of republicanism is, in the words of Alexander Hamilton,
"that the people should choose whom they please to govern them." By expressly
setting out to stop people from outside of the government from winning
elections, California has attacked this principle so directly as to enable the
first viable guarantee clause suit in the history of the nation. Will the courts
hear it?

Update: The foolish Supremes turned down their chance to set
a truly important precedent, but at least my petition to the Supremes put my
briefs in proper final order. Anyone who lives in a state that limits candidacy
to members of the government itself, use my brief as a template and sue until
somebody wins! Not every judge can be brain dead.

Just protect liberty directly (by articulating the full ideal of
protected liberty and placing it in the Constitution) instead of indirectly (by
placing restrictions on law enforcement). Liberty will be much better protected
(it will be protected systematically, in place of the hit and miss of indirect
protection). This in turn will render indirect protections superfluous, allowing
indirect protections to be largely dispensed with, untying the hands of law enforcement. If good is to triumph over evil in the
21st century, half the population must read this. Go.

Just have juries hand down multiple verdicts according to
multiple standards of guilt.

Our present one verdict system lumps the certainly guilty
together with the almost certainly guilty, some of whom are innocent. This
greatly limits the severity with which we can deal with the certainly guilty
while imposing horrific injuries on the wrongly convicted. By the simple device
of asking juries to discriminate further we can gain tremendous leverage over
the guilty while greatly reducing harm to the innocent. Go.

The above "direct protection" and "multiple verdicts" schemes
present the most immediately important sections of a book on republicanism that
I am writing. The leverage over the guilty that these two schemes
generate combine multiplicatively, not additively. Ten times ten baby. Our body
politic needs a modern immune system and this is it. The criminals are history. It might even be enough to deal with the
Islamists, and their descendants. For a short introduction to both schemes, and how they fit into the
larger structure of republicanism, click here to view the introduction to my book on republicanism.

4)
Distrust in truth: studies in the phenomenon of illiberal "liberalism."

Those who call themselves "liberal" in America are relentlessly
illiberal. Not only are they against gun rights and school choice. They are
against choice on abortion (in favor of forcing people who think abortion is
murder to pay for other people's abortions). They are
anti-raising-your-own-children (in favor of forcing families with
stay-at-home-moms to subsidize working-moms via the socialization of day-care).
They are anti-freedom-of-contract (in favor of replacing the at-will contract,
where merit is judged by liberty, with government oversight of merit whenever
race, sex, language, religion, handicap, sexual behavior, or any other mark of
“diversity” is involved, which will soon be always). They reject freedom of
association and the treating of people as individuals in favor of sweeping
racial, gender and other preferences imposed by law. Etcetera ad nauseum.
There is virtually no issue on which "liberals" are liberal.

How to account for this astounding phenomenon? There is a
profound correspondence between genuine liberalism and trust in truth. The truth
is that liberty works. Gun rights work. School choice works. Freedom of contract
works. Freedom of association works. Thus trust in truth leads to trust in
liberty. The connection also goes the other way. Trust in liberty leads to
truth. Liberty sets up a society-wide scientific process as individuals and
groups make and disseminate their own discoveries about where value lies and how
to pursue it. Liberty allows everyone's ideas to be tested against reality,
thereby uncovering reality, and this discovery of truth leads to trust in truth,
because the truth is that only the truth matters. Thus every society is marked
by competing synergies. Trust in liberty leads to expansion of liberty
which leads to expansion of truth which leads to trust in truth which leads to
further trust in liberty; while diminution of liberty leads to diminution of
truth and diminished trust in truth which leads to distrust in liberty which
leads to further diminution of liberty.

This subject has long been a research topic for me. During the
summer of 2003 I wrote up two short studies exposing and accounting for
illiberal "liberalism." One is a "Special Report" documenting distrust in truth
on the part of California's "liberal" newspapers:

The other is a dissection of the anti-conservative theory of
conservatism, published in a psychological journal by four leftist "liberal"
professors at Stanford, Berkeley and the University of Maryland in July of
'03:

In presenting their characterization of conservatives, who they take to be
their opposites, these self-professedly "liberal" professors actually give, in photo negative, a pretty
compelling picture of their own illiberal-liberal minds, and it isn't just them.
Apparently this kind of photo-negative self-description has been going on for
fifty years, all compiled by the four lefty professors in their glorified
literature review, lending perhaps some real credence to this
self-characterization by the left. Both the methods and the results of the study
strongly support the connection between illiberalism and distrust in truth and
help to give an account of it.

In addition to a modern immune system, our body politic also
needs a modern brain. Again, this is from my upcoming book on republicanism.
Again, what I am releasing now only focuses on the most immediate need. I'm
just trying to hook up that one wire that will bring a dead picture tube to
life. Go.

What am I doing pressing a suit? I don't even wear a
suit. Look at the knot on that tie.

Imagine if those who shared some particular set of political or cultural
interests started paying for online content that they thought was worth their
time. That group would gain a huge advantage because their intellectuals would
be supported in our society. In particular, when the mainstream media, with its
numerous little bastions of monopoly power, are almost entirely controlled by
one political party, paying for content online allows alternative viewpoints to
be supported.

Ideally, this support should be on a unit basis,
maybe five or ten cents per short article. Unfortunately, micro-payments that
small are still
not supported. The PayPal fee schedule on donations, the one viable service for
this kind of transaction at present, is 30 cents + 2.2%. As a practical matter,
then, donations have to be lump sum rather than item by item, but this is only a
small hurdle. Have you
found my writings worth your time? Then please consider paying me one tenth, or
one hundredth, of the value of your time (or of what you are willing to sell it
to your employers for) for the time you spend here.

Eventually, this kind of scheme will enable the decentralized coordination of
intelligence. As people pay for what they find worthwhile, information will
accumulate about who has similar judgment about what things. (The accuracy of
this information can be increased by people taking another few seconds to submit
numerical ratings of merit for what they are paying for). It will then be
possible to compile this feedback automatically and use it to formulate
personalized predictions of what individual users will find most worth their
time, based on what other individuals who display similar judgment have rated
most worthwhile. Such a system will allow everyone to act as everyone else's
eyes and ears, which will allow current editorial bottlenecks to be bypassed.

The accuracy of the predictions offered by this kind of "rating engine" is a
function of the ratings base that it has to project from. As more people use it,
predictive power will increase until at some point the predictive power will be
such that payments will probably switch to the same up-front format as for other consumer
goods. People will prefer to spend a small fraction of the value of their time
attending to what can be expected to be worth their time rather than waste a large
fraction of their time looking for what is worth their time. Efficiency and
desert will both be served. Less time will be wasted, and merit will be both
disseminated and rewarded automatically. Until then, dissemination of judgment and the
rewarding of merit depend on the socially concerned
action of individuals. It is up to each of us to spread the word about what is
worthwhile, and to pay for it, so that
those who speak for us can continue to do so.

All it requires is for lots of people to take five minutes to enter their
credit card numbers one time at PayPal. All PayPal wants is thirty cents a pop. We
can deal with that, until we can convince them to give us something like a 12.2% fee
schedule on the first $3 (the point beyond which 12.2% becomes
greater than 30 cents + 2.2%), on the condition that donators have a positive PayPal balance (in which case PayPal does not have to bill the credit card, reducing
its transactions costs to almost zero, a matter of automated internal accounting).
That kind of pure percentage fee schedule will allow true micro-payments. Until
then, we just need to make our payments to each other lump sum instead of pay as
you go. Wait till you figure you owe me a buck or two, then send it along. PayPal
will come around (or risk losing out to who will) but there is no need for us to
wait. As is, PayPal is offering We the People an unprecedented opportunity to
break the mainstream media monopoly on who gets paid for their contributions to
public discussion. Let's take advantage of it.

Sometime around the year 2000 I switched from using a Mac to
using a Windows machine. In the turnover, I lost the ability to hook my old Mac
up to the internet. I got new website software and my old site ended up getting
overwritten, despite my having put a hell of a lot of work into it. I always
figured it would be an easy matter to at some point figure out how to get the
old Mac stuff combined with the new Windows stuff so I could get my earlier work
online again, and it probably would have been easy, but I never got around to it
until now (late 2011, more than ten years later).

Copyright and all other intellectual property rights
Alec Rawls 1998/99

Welcome to rawls.org, authored by Alec
Rawls. I established this site to promote my run for Sheriff
of Santa Clara County in the June '98 primary elections and
to make available my writings on many subjects, most
importantly my magnum opusMoral
Science.

Republicanism violated: only members of the
incumbent regime are allowed to run for sheriff. They aren't allowing
us throw the bums out!

In March '98 I sued the State of California for ballot access in the
Sheriff's race. The Sheriff's association, the biggest spending lobby
in the state, has succeeded in paying the legislature to ban their
electoral competition. Only current and recent members of law
enforcement are allowed to run for leadership of law enforcement. This
is an unprecedented assault on the accountability of government to The
People. For the first time in our nation's history members of the
government itself have been granted exclusive privilege in the
electoral process. While Supreme Court precedent requires that election
laws be designed to facilitate accurate representation of the will of
The People, this law is designed to limit the views that The People are
allowed to express, and in the most audacious fashion: NO CIVILIAN
VIEWPOINTS ALLOWED!

My suit against this unconstitutional usurpation of the democratic
process for the very important office of sheriff has led to a key
discovery--the actual meaning of the Constitution's Article IV Section
4 guarantee to the states that they shall have "a republican form of
government"--and how it is indeed justiciable according to the letter
of existing Supreme Court precedent, despite the Court's own summary
statements to the contrary. The Court's actual bases for ruling earlier
cases nonjusticiable admit of crucial exceptions which have simply not
been represented in any case the court has ever heard. This would have
changed if I could have gotten the Court to hear my case, the first
properly justiciable guarantee clause case ever brought. They failed to
pay attention, but my briefs lay out the roadmap for a later suit to
end the gurantee clause's present state of duessitude.

To see my campaign materials and the
pleadings from my suit, click on Rawls
for Sheriff.

Combining the economic theory of means with a theory of
ends based on John Stuart Mill's distinction between higher
and lower ends yields a complete analysis of value, from ends to means, with
which numerous questions of policy and law can be
answered.

Mr. Knowitall is my
alter-ego from a topical student publication at Stanford
which I co-edit called The Thinker. Since I end up
writing on most of the different topics I decided to make a
schtick out of it. If I know so much, I'll just pretend to
know everything! To see Mr. Knowitall at his blatant best,
read, for instance,
Woman
and Superwoman. I have been writing and editing for
The
Thinkersince '1996. My relationship with
The
Stanford Review, where many of the articles in
the different volumes on this web page were originally
published, goes back a couple of years further. Visit either
of these publications by clicking their names here.

Also available or your reading pleasure is a solid second
draft of my play Draco is
Antæus, the story of a clash of titans in 7th
century B. C.. Draco is the Sheriff to end all Sheriffs.
Remember where the word draconian comes from? Draco punished
every crime with death. Antæus must teach him how this
violates the requirements of moral reason. Draco learns, and
comes back with the ultimate scheme for eliminating
crime.

Since recovering from a knee injury six years ago I have
switched from basketball as my main recreation to ballroom
dance (a generic term for all the partner dances, smooth,
latin and club). Ladies, you can learn by doing. The man
controls your shoulders, you keep your hips with your
shoulders, and that gives the man control of your feet, both
for timing (rhythm) and placement. If the man can lead then
you can dance the first time without knowing anything.
Still, it helps to know what you are trying to learn, and
the subtleties (at an introductory level) run to twenty
pages. Click Alec on
Following for a primer. Men, once the ladies start
going dancing, you'll put in the effort to learn to lead,
right? (You have to learn your steps, her steps, and how to
lead her steps.) Well, go check out the dance-floors. The
girls are already going! So learn.